Ken Rogers, Executive Director of Automation Alley, speaks to the participants of 2013 Technology Industry Report event held at Troy Marriott on Thursday, March 29, 2014. Photo by Aftab Borka

Troy >> Metro Detroit continues its growth as a tech industry giant with employment growth and a substantial gain in technology sector jobs, according to a report released by Automation Alley.

The Troy-based technology business association and business accelerator detailed its 2013 Technology Industry Report at the Detroit Marriott in Troy on Thursday. The report, which compares the Detroit Metropolitan Area with 14 other technology hubs throughout the U.S. including Silicon Valley and Chicago, was compiled by East Lansing-based Anderson Economic Group, LLC.

The report detailed that tech industry employment in Metro Detroit was up 15 percent from the previous year’s study, while Silicon Valley shows a 4 percent drop. Detroit’s technology sector added more than 30,000 jobs with 242,520 tech industry jobs in 2011, up from 210,984 jobs in 2010.

No other analyzed region had a greater technology industry growth than Metro Detroit in this same period, surpassing Silicon Valley’s technology sector, which lost 10,000 in this time frame.

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Michigan also leads the nation in the advanced automotive industry with Metro Detroit’s employment concentration six and a half times the national average, according to the report.

“We’re not a one-horse marketplace,” he said. “We’re not reliant on just the auto industry. It’s obvious now that the tech that we have here spreads out into life sciences and alternative fuels and so on. We see growth in these areas.”

Metro Detroit’s life sciences employment nearly doubled in size from 22,093 jobs in 2010 to 42,451 in 2011, with the scientific research and development sub-sectors heading the pack and causing the region to rank second in life sciences employment among the other hubs analyzed.

Patrick Anderson, Principal and CEO of Anderson Economic Group, LL, said considering the Metro Detroit region’s number of high-tech hospitals, research universities like Wayne State and U of M and the region’s pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing background, it makes sense that it’s rebounding.

“That has developed for us a set of competencies and a set of skills we are beginning to leverage,” he said, “and we didn’t recognize it until 6 to 7 years ago. I’m not surprised it’s swung back.”

Dr. Michael Grieves, a product lifecycle management expert, said the region’s history as an automotive manufacturing giant helped set the stage for a standard of reliability which he said can only being found in Detroit.

“The auto business being so tough is a basis not only for reliability but also quality manufacturing,” he said. “Basically, being able to have risk management and all these sorts of things that the auto business takes for granted, (other areas) are sort of learning to do that.”

Grieves added that Silicon Valley’s decrease in employment could be attributed to an attempted integration of software with mechanical products -- something the automotive industry in Metro Detroit has excelled at for years.

“Bugs in mechanical things aren’t really good,” he said. “I think that is merging mechanical and software is a huge deal and we have a substantial advantage.”

“We’ve got to change how we see ourselves,” he continued. “This is a major center for engineering in the world. We need to get that; we need to understand there are 15 tech hubs in the U.S. and we’re a player amongst those 15.”

Anderson added that the region possesses a huge potential for growth through education; schools in the Metro Detroit region graduated more students in the areas of engineering and engineering technology than any other region in the study, according to the report.

“We have complaints about being treated like a flyover state,” Anderson said. “We have to understand what we’re good at and we’re good at great stuff.”